EME? CDM? DRM? CENC? IDK!

Description

Once there was the “video” tag, but content distributors decided it wasn’t enough. They wanted more—more power, more protection, more control—so encrypted media extensions were born, and digital rights management appeared in our browsers. Sebastian Golasch walks you through the technical details behind EMEs, CDMs, and DRM by reverse engineering and building a Netflix video player. You’ll learn how Sebastian came to understand the messy, monstrous world of DRMed videos on the web, how fragmented this ecosystem is, and who is in control of what. It’s a depressing but fun journey full of WTFs and technical and legal constraints.

Topics include:

• A supershort history of web video
• The different meanings behind DRM for web videos
• Different DRM implementations and protocols and when and why they’re used
• CDM (Content Decryption Module) overview and how it’s used to decrypt videos
• Why hardware acceleration is mostly a no-go for web video
• What EMEs (encrypted media extensions) are and what implementations on the client look like
• The flow of a browser requesting and playing encrypted video
• What restrictions video platforms get from content providers
• Bonus: Netflix on a Raspberry Pi isn’t a myth.